A Venetian Vignette One Hundred Years after Marco Polo

A Venetian Vignette One Hundred Years after Marco Polo
ELFRIEDE R. KNAUER
Dedicated to Joan and Paul Bernard
A
mong the many remarkable objects shown in the
exhibition “Venice and the Islamic World 828–
1797,” held at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris,
and the Metropolitan Museum in 2006–7, was an illustration in Li livres du Graunt Caam (The Book of the Great
Khan), a manuscript in the Bodleian Library in Oxford (MS
Bodley 264) that is a copy of a fourteenth-century French
prose text illuminated in Paris (British Library, Royal 19 D.I).1
The Bodley manuscript is one of some one hundred fifty
known versions, in Franco-Italian, Tuscan, Venetian, German, Latin, and French, made in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries from the lost text of the famous Travels of Marco
Polo, also called Il milione (A Million) or Le livre des merveilles (The Book of Marvels), which was composed in
French or Franco-Italian by Rustichello of Pisa from accounts
he reportedly heard from Marco Polo (1254–1324) while
they were both being held prisoner in Genoa in 1298.2 The
splendid illumination on folio 218r of Bodley 264 (Figure
1), frequently reproduced but rarely discussed in detail,
depicts the departure of the young Marco Polo, his father,
Niccolò, and his uncle Maffeo from Venice in 1271.3 The
miniature can be ascribed to an English master who signed
the miniature on folio 220 of the manuscript Johannes me
fecit. The style suggests a date of 1400–1410.
Experienced merchants, the elder Polos had spent several years doing business out of Soldaia (Sudak), on the
Crimean coast of the Black Sea (see Figure 2), where they
had owned a house since the 1250s.4 Soldaia was a major
emporium of Italian, specifically Venetian, traders who
exchanged their own Western products—mostly metals,
glass, linen, wool, and silk cloth—for raw materials and
goods—grains, hides, wax, furs, raw and finished silk, condiments, carpets, slaves—from all over the Mongol realm,
from the Golden Horde in the Kipchak steppe to the Ilkhans
in Persia to the great commercial centers in Central Asia
such as Samarkand and Bukhara.5
Metropolitan Museum Journal 44
© 2009 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
In 1260 the Polos were on the move, trading in jewels at
Sarai on the Volga, the residence of Berke, Khan of the
Golden Horde. They went on to Bukhara, where they stayed
for three years because war had broken out between Berke
and the Ilkhan Hülegu, both grandsons of Genghis Khan. In
Bukhara, they were asked to and did join an embassy from
Hülegu to the Great Khan.6 In 1266 the brothers finally
reached the Mongol imperial court in Shangdu, where they
soon won the confidence of Khubilai (r. 1260–94), yet
another grandson of Genghis Khan. Having first occupied
northern China, by 1279 Khubilai had wrested the south
from the Song Dynasty, reunifying the vast empire and
establishing the Yuan Dynasty. In 1269 he entrusted the
Polos with a mission to the pope requesting one hundred
skilled missionaries, together with oil from the lamp that
burned in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.7
Khubilai may have felt the need to engage potent foreign
experts, whom he perhaps expected to be magicians, to
control the restive country and intimidate his enemies.8 As
shamanists, the Mongols’ attitude toward foreign creeds
was indifferent; they were concerned only that the various
beliefs prove themselves strong and useful for the khan’s
purposes. Rather than relying solely on Chinese bureaucrats
whose loyalty might be questionable, Khubilai gathered
Confucian scholars, Tibetan Buddhists (perhaps the khan’s
favorites because of their “expertise in magic”), Daoists,
Muslims, Jews, and Nestorians and other Christian denominations at his court and in his administration. The task
assigned to the Polos had nothing unusual about it.
Though the Polo brothers were able to use the imperial
relay post, the trip back was arduous enough. On reaching
the Mediterranean at the port of Layas (in the gulf of Iskenderun, or Alexandretta), they learned that Pope Clement IV
had died in November 1268. The brothers decided to wait
out the interregnum at home in Venice, but when it lasted
ever longer, in 1271 they resolved to return to the Great
Khan to apprise him of events. This time, Niccolò’s seventeen-year-old son Marco accompanied them. Gregory X
was made pope in 1271, while he happened to be serving
A Venetian Vignette 47
1. Johannes. The Departure
of the Polos from Venice.
England, ca. 1400–1410.
Tempera and gold on
parchment, 16 x 12 in.
(40.6 x 30 cm). The Bodleian
Library, University of
Oxford, MS Bodl. 264,
fol. 218r
48
as archdeacon in Acre in the Holy Land. There the Polos,
now on their second voyage, consulted him shortly before
his election. They also succeeded in obtaining the oil from
the Holy Sepulcher.
It has often been remarked that the bird’s-eye view of
Venice depicted in the miniature in the Bodley manuscript
(Figure 1) cannot have been based on a personal knowledge
of the city but is rather an imaginary reconstruction from
hearsay, possibly reports from eyewitnesses or pilgrims,
cast in the artistic conventions familiar to an English miniaturist of the early fifteenth century.9 The two Oriental granite
columns bearing the statues of the Eastern saint Theodore
the Dragon Slayer, first patron of Venice, and of the winged
lion, symbol of Saint Mark, who became the protector of the
Serenissima after his relics reached the city, allegedly in
A.D. 828, are accurately placed in the piazzetta, quite close
to the water’s edge.10 Yet they do not face the piazzetta as
they should, and Saint Theodore appears in the guise of the
winged archangel Michael, a figure more familiar to Western
viewers. While the positions of the Palazzo Ducale and Saint
Mark’s, the state basilica, are fairly exact, their architecture
bears no relation to reality. It is only the two arcades—
the upper one delicately lacy—that gird the turreted castle
and the four bronze horses on the balcony of the adjacent
building that signal the identity of the palace and the basilica. Most likely these details were highlighted in the written
and painted sources that guided the miniaturist Johannes.
In typical medieval fashion, the leave-taking and departure of the Polos is narrated in sequential scenes. Having left
the Piazzetta San Marco via an arched stone bridge, the
Ponte della Paglia, the family is shown surrounded by friends
on the Riva degli Schiavoni (Figure 3).11 Young Marco, with
short-cropped hair and wearing a cinnabar-colored outfit
that includes hose and shoes, stands listening to a group of
youths.12 The white-bearded and hatted man in pale pink,
which the catalogue of the 2006–7 exhibition identifies as
2. Soldaia (Sudak), Crimea
(Ukraine), view from the
north. Photograph: Elfriede R.
Knauer
3. Detail of Figure 1
A Venetian Vignette 49
4. Detail of Figure 1
50
Marco,13 is in fact Marco’s father, Niccolò. Marco’s uncle
Maffeo, who has doffed his hat to reveal his still chestnut
hair, is barely visible behind his older brother and can be
identified in the group of elderly citizens only by his pale
mauve hose and shoes. The young man with a ewer on the
bridge may be offering the Polos a farewell cup. The next
scene (again, see Figure 3) shows Maffeo in full as the Polos
gallantly board a barge across a rickety plank and wave
good-bye to their friends, old and young. The threesome is
seen for the last time in a cog under full sail leaving the
safety of the Canale di San Marco for the open waters in the
company of two more ships (Figure 4).14
Two more manned cogs and a galley with close-reefed
sails are anchored in the canal. Their pennants indicate the
direction of the wind that also bellies the sails of the Polos’
vessel and its companions. In the galley’s aft is the customary open cabin of the commander or guest of honor, often,
as here, covered with a precious textile.15 Above this group
of vessels, a barge emerges from under the Ponte della Paglia
on the Rio di Palazzo, propelled with two oars by a standing
hooded figure in gray—a gondoliere avant la lettre. One of
the thole-pins, the pole of the oar, and the eddy caused by
the blade are visible in the enlarged detail (Figure 3).
At the lower edge of the miniature, just below the
anchored ships in what is presumably the Canal Grande
and to the left of the little Gothic church in the position of
present-day Santa Maria della Salute, is an intriguing device
that is never mentioned in the discussions of the scene (see
5. A domesticated great cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo) on the
Lijiang River, Guanxi, China, 2005. Photograph: Miguel A. Monjas
6. Cormorant fishing on Eir Lake near Dali, Yunan, China, 2006.
Photograph: Frédéric Lemaréchal, alias Maboko (license: Creative
Commons Paternité)
7. Vittore Carpaccio (Venetian, ca. 1455–1523/26). Hunting on the Lagoon, ca. 1490–95.
Oil on panel, 29 3⁄4 x 25 1⁄8 in. (75.6 x 63.8 cm). J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
(79.PB.72)
8. Top: Vittore Carpaccio. Hunting on the Lagoon (Figure 7).
Bottom: Vittore Carpaccio, Two Venetian Ladies on a Balcony, ca.
1490–95. Oil on wood, 37 x 25 1⁄4 in. (94 x 64 cm). Museo Civico
Correr, Venice. Photograph: Scala / Art Resource, New York
Figure 4).16 Wooden stakes have been driven into the mud
of the shallow waters to form a circular enclosure with a
substantial perch inside, an installation that to my knowledge is unparalleled in Western painting, either of the period
or later. In a prominent position and rendered as meticulously as any other object in the miniature, it must have had
a purpose that made sense to the illuminator and his audience. The duck and two gulls next to the enclosure are to
scale, but the disproportionately large swans that cruise and
feed in the canal next to the Polos’ embarkation warn
against taking the representation of wildlife in the image
too literally.
The low salinity of the upper Adriatic provides ideal living conditions for a multitude of wildlife, fish as well as
birds, especially during the migration periods. I propose
that the contraption in the miniature is a pen for cormorants, specifically for the great cormorant (Phalacrocorax
carbo), a member of the large family Phalacrocoracidae, the
only cormorant with a white throat (Figures 5, 6).17 Excellent
divers, swift underwater swimmers, and voracious eaters,
these sociable birds thrive in both salt- and sweet-water
habitats, and their distribution is almost universal. Because
the glands they, like other aquatic fowl, possess to oil themselves with a water-repellent substance are extremely small
in cormorants, the birds tend to sink once afloat.18 Just the
necks and heads remain visible, which facilitates diving but
every so often requires that they carefully dry their plumage
in the sun, with wings spread wide. Cormorants are easily
domesticated, but to prevent them from escaping their
wings must be clipped and they must be kept in pens either
A Venetian Vignette 51
9. Inside the Genoese
fortress of 1266 at Caffa
(Feodosiya), Crimea,
Ukraine. Photograph:
Elfriede R. Knauer
52
on land or, as our miniature seems to suggest, in watery
coops; both methods require their being carried to and from
work. Their home in the canal, as shown in the view of Venice
in the Bodley manuscript, seems a logical solution, since
much of the city’s life did and still does take place afloat.
Another, much better known image of Venetian customs,
or rather upper-class diversions, offers a clue to the services
domesticated cormorants provide to their masters. Vittore
Carpaccio’s Hunting on the Lagoon of 1490–95 in the Getty
Museum in Los Angeles (Figure 7) shows the upper segment
of a panel that was discovered to be part of the famous
painting Two Venetian Ladies on a Balcony at the Museo
Civico Correr in Venice (Figure 8).19 The somewhat enigmatic deportment of the youths who stand in the seven
barges, each slowly propelled by two oarsmen with a blackamoor steering, was explained only recently. Perched quietly on the edges of the boats are several cormorants, and
more of the well-trained birds are in the water, diving and
capturing fish (two of which are draped over the prow of
one of the boats on the left). To spur the birds’ return aboard
and make them disgorge the catch they store in their extendable gullets, the youths hit them with bow-propelled earthenware pellets. The elegant outfits of the young men
demonstrate the elite character of the activity. The outing
will find its festive conclusion in the reed huts on an island
in the marshes of the lagoon seen in the background, where
the catch will be consumed, stag party fashion, with no
ladies present. On a rooftop terrace in the lower portion of the
painting the fair sex waits—visibly bored—for the return of the
youth, or at least for a page to deliver a note from them.20
What made the correct interpretation of the scene so difficult until now is Carpaccio’s intentional disregard of the
messier part of the activity—the emptying of the cormorants’ gullets and the gutting of the catch—which would
have seriously disturbed the balance and serenity of his
unparalleled painting. For his contemporaries the telescoping of sequential events posed no difficulty; Venetians of the
day must have enjoyed the mildly ironic juxtaposition of the
activities that Carpaccio’s panel so masterfully reflects. The
Getty’s Fishing with Cormorants (the painting’s proper title)
suggests that before becoming a pastime for the leisure class
cormorant fishing must have served a more practical purpose, perhaps not on a commercial scale but to satisfy the
needs of families. The contraption shown in the view of
Venice that Johannes created to embellish Marco Polo’s
Milione may provide the answer. The pen in the Canal
Grande, as unobtrusive and run-of-the-mill as the women
shopping at the butcher’s in the piazza,21 attests to fishing
with cormorants as an accepted and effective way of providing the city with food almost a century before Carpaccio
depicted it. But when and from where was it introduced?
The international character of the Mongol empire, where
commerce was much encouraged and foreign religions
were tolerated, attracted to China not only Western merchants but also Latin Christian missionaries, primarily
Franciscans and Dominicans. Promoted by Rome and welcomed early on by the Muslim Ilkhans in Persia, the priests
established convents and churches that served the Italian
communities and were points of departure for missionary
work. An archbishopric was established in Sultania, the
capital of the Ilkhans, in 1318. By 1325 colonies of mainly
Genoese Italian merchants served by friars and bishops
existed in Zaiton (today Quanzhou), Yangzhou, and
Hangzhou along the south coast of China. Trans-Asian commercial activities were much curtailed when the Khans of
the Golden Horde embraced Islam in the 1340s. Soon after,
the Italian emporia and with them the monastic houses at
Tana at the mouth of the Don22 and Caffa, or Feodosiya, on
the Crimea (see Figure 9) were wiped out by the Kipchak
Khan. At the end of the fourteenth century, Timur’s reign in
Persia rang the death knell for many Christian establishments. In China, Khubilai’s successors favored Tibetan
Buddhism, and the fall of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty to the
Ming in 1368 added to the withering of commercial ties
across an increasingly insecure Asia.23
Though the so-called Pax Mongolica lasted not much
more than a century, the Christian ambassadors and missionaries who undertook the arduous trip to the East, either
by land or by sea, left many precious reports on the Mongol
realm. Unlike Marco Polo’s Milione, which was aimed at a
different public, their accounts often evince a modern ethnographer’s acuity.24 Marco Polo himself never mentions
fishing with cormorants. The first known description of the
practice was written by the Franciscan Odorico Matiussi,
better known as Odoric of Pordenone (1263–1331), who
was buried in Udine and beatified in 1755. A native of Friuli,
Odoric visited Persia, India, Central Asia, and China over a
period of twelve years and upon his return to Padua in 1330
dictated his Relatio to a fellow brother, William of Solagna.
I came to a certain great river, and I tarried at a certain city which hath a bridge across that river. And at
the head of the bridge was a hostel in which I was
entertained. And mine host, wishing to gratify me,
said: “If thou wouldst like to see good fishing, come
with me.” And so he led me upon the bridge, and I
looked and saw in some boats of his that were there
certain water-fowl tied upon perches. And these he
now tied with a cord round the throat that they might
not be able to swallow the fish which they caught.
Next he proceeded to put three great baskets into a
boat, one at each end and the third in the middle,
and then he let the water-fowl loose. Straightaway
they began to dive into the water, catching great
numbers of fish, and ever as they caught them putting them of their own accord into the baskets, so
that before long all the three baskets were full. And
mine host then took the cord off their necks and let
them dive again to catch fish for their own food.
And when they had thus fed they returned to their
perches and were tied up as before. And some of
those fish I had for my dinner.25
At which city and river Odoric witnessed cormorant fishing is unknown. That his Latin Itinerary had already been
much copied and translated by early in the fourteenth century—there are Italian, French, and German versions—
attests to great contemporary interest. His may not have
been the only testimony, however, for after his return he
himself mentioned conversations in Venice with people
who had also visited China.26 Word of mouth may have
contributed to the rapid spread of the efficient new fishing
method, and the almost universal distribution of cormorants
must have enhanced its acceptance in much of Europe. Yet
proof for this assumption comes only from much later
sources.27 The hypothesis that the Bodley miniature might
be the earliest Western attestation so far of this highly
sophisticated and efficient activity may one day be confirmed by other documents. In any case, late medieval
works of art, large or small, deserve to be scrutinized more
painstakingly for telling realia.
The strange assemblage of beasts shown in the lower left
corner of the miniature (see Figure 10) also merits further
consideration. Pale brown and gray rocky outcrops define
an otherwise lush, wooded promontory. The single trees
implausibly perched on the crags recall the highly stylized
landscapes in late Byzantine art. Venetian painters persis-
tently adhered to Byzantine models even after Renaissance
precepts had already taken root in the city, and this may be
yet another hint of the miniaturist relying on images based
on Venetian formulas, albeit mediated ones.28 The strangest
feature of the scene, greatly blemished by a loss of pigment,
is the top part of a nude human figure who seems to be
reaching for a fruit in the tree above. Nearby, a pair of lions
and a leopard rest peacefully while a huge bird appears to
inspect two smaller ones nested in the grass. Unlike other
Italian municipalities in the late Middle Ages, Venice is not
known to have kept a collection of exotic animals within its
territory. Leonardo Olschki has suggested that the creatures
may allude to the unexplored regions of the earth the Polos
intended to visit, just as on somewhat earlier mappae mundi
such empty spaces are frequently enlivened with images of
predators: hic sunt leones.29
Carpaccio’s mysterious Meditation on the Passion of
about 1510 (Figure 11) is instructive in this regard. Of modest dimensions and clearly a devotional painting, it shows
the dead Christ poised on a broken marble throne, flanked
by Job on his left and Saint Jerome on his right. The Hebrew
inscription engraved on Job’s cubic seat—“but as for me I
know that my redeemer liveth” (Job 19.25)—was taken by
Jerome in his Moralia in Job, written in the Holy Land, as
prefiguring the resurrection of Christ. Jerome is shown here
in the guise of a hermit. A wealth of iconographical details
have been astutely interpreted with respect to their christological allusions. The bird rising behind Christ’s throne is
10. Detail of Figure 1
A Venetian Vignette 53
11. Vittore Carpaccio.
Meditation on the Passion,
ca. 1510. Signed: vjctorjs
carpattjj / venettj opus. Oil
and tempera on wood, 27 3⁄4 x
34 1⁄8 in. (70.5 x 86.7 cm). The
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
John Stewart Kennedy Fund,
1911 (11.118)
recognized as portent of his reappearance.30 Of special
interest in this context are the two contrasting landscapes in
the background: on the left is a rocky wilderness that looks
as though it was at some point converted by man into a
burial ground but has since been neglected and taken over
by wild animals. A doe grazes on the lowermost outcropping, unaware of the stag being felled by a leopard farther
up the cliff, and at the top a wolf lurks in a cave, perhaps
the mouth of hell.
On the right of Carpaccio’s painting, in an otherwise
serene view of the piedmont, a leopard pursues a deer on
the hither side of a brook crossed by a rickety bridge.
Beyond the stream is a fortified settlement that could be
anywhere in the foothills of the Dolomites, and yet this is
the Orient, as only beturbaned figures inhabit the scene.
The Holy Land was certainly thought of as the home of wild
beasts in late medieval times.31 Though the leopard was also
the favorite status-enhancing participant in the hunts of
Islamic and Mongol royalty and their retainers, and Italian
artists were perfectly well aware of this fact,32 Carpaccio
endowed these creatures with a symbolism both sinister
54
and redemptive that is rooted in the Bible, specifically in the
book of Job.33 He showed the leopard in pursuit of a stag,
the age-old Christian metaphor of the human soul.34 And
the painting must also be seen as symbolic of Christianity at
risk of falling prey to the infidels.
It was hardly accidental that in Venice at that time a
fresh, intense movement toward a more personal religiosity
arose from the unfulfilled yearning for a reformed church,
which Rome failed to offer. The “global” perspective of the
Venetian merchant aristocracy made the city’s residents
more susceptible to the fundamental questions of faith and
the human condition raised by ever mounting calamities, as
devotional paintings such as Carpaccio’s Meditation on the
Passion attest. In the first decade of the sixteenth century,
when this panel was most probably painted, the powerful
Serenissima was suddenly faced with enormous challenges.
She lost the terra firma to the forces of the League of
Cambrai that united the German emperor, France, and the
pope against her, and the constantly renewed Ottoman
attacks menaced her possessions in the Eastern Mediterranean and on the Dalmatian coast.35 The anguish and the
hopes of those troubled times seem to pervade Carpaccio’s
painting.
By contrast, in the Bodley miniature the serene wild
beasts on a shaded promontory in company of the First Man
appear to reflect a paradisiacal though distant world, the
exploration of which held out promise to Italian monks and
merchants, both spiritually and materially, in the course of
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.36 The promise was
owed to the Pax Mongolica, an all too brief interval of relative calm and prosperity.37
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am most grateful to Katharine Baetjer for facilitating the
publication of Carpaccio’s Meditation on the Passion and to
Joan R. Mertens for her unfailing help in giving shape to this
piece.
N OT E S
1. Carboni et al. 2007, p. 299, no. 15, with previous literature. See
also Pächt and Alexander 1973, p. 70, no. 792, pl. LXXV, and
Dutschke 1998. For an English translation of the text, see Yule
(1903) 1993.
2. See Larner 1999, chap. 4, “The Making of the Book,” pp. 68–87.
3. Carboni et al. 2007, ill. p. 58, cover ill.; Pächt and Alexander 1973,
pl. 75. Though the miniature is generally in excellent condition, the
loss of pigment has left some jagged white spots.
4. Larner 1999, p. 33.
5. Soldaia (Greek Sougdaia) may have been founded by Sogdian merchants from present-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan (see La Vaissière
2005, pp. 242–49). According to sixth-century Byzantine sources,
Sogdians, endorsed by the West Turkish Khan Istämi, approached
the Byzantine court to gain support for the transport of Chinese silk
via the northern steppe route, since the Sassanians had blocked the
normal passage through Central Asia (see Knauer 2001, especially
pp. 134ff.; for the Greek text, see Blockley 1985). The so-called
Codex Cumanicus in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice (Cod. Mar.
Lat. Zan 549 [1597]), a composite work compiled between the
1290s and the 1350s and apparently begun in a monastery of Saint
John outside Sarai, provides a panoramic picture of mercantile and
missionary activities in the Kipchak realm and beyond. A West
Turkic tribal association, the Cumans/Kipchaks, though under the
sovereignty of Berke Khan, dominated the steppes between the
Dnjestr and the Don, including the Crimea. It was with them that
the merchants and monks had to deal (see Schmieder and Schreiner
2005 and Golden 1992; see also Drimba 2000). The languages
recorded in the codex (vocabularies and short texts) are Latin,
Cuman, Italian dialects, and a German dialect; Persian, Greek,
Slavic, and Mongolian elements are also found, reflecting the polyethnic origins of the population, specifically of the Crimea. The
lingua franca of the Mongol empire was, however, Persian, which
Marco Polo may have mastered, though he seems to have remained
ignorant of Chinese. For the political history of the region, see
Spuler 1965 and also Vásáry 2005. For a detailed study of the relations between the West and China from antiquity to the High
Middle Ages, see Reichert 1992, which deals extensively with
Marco Polo and other visitors to China. On the slave trade, see
note 22 below.
6. For details on the voyage of the brothers, see the second chapter
of Larner’s excellent study (1999, pp. 31–45). The famous globe
designed by Martin Behaim for the City Council at Nürnberg in
1492 and kept in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum there shows
three men in Armenia, perhaps the Polos. Much of the information
in Marco’s book has been absorbed into the globe; see Muris 1943
and Willers 1992.
7. This may have been at the request of Khubilai’s Christian wives,
and the oil could also have served to work magic, an important
aspect of shamanism, which the Mongols practiced. See Larner
1999, p. 35.
8. Peter Jackson (2005, p. 264 and passim) speaks of the khans’ need
of “religious specialists.” His article presents an excellent analysis
of the complex character of Mongol beliefs and attitudes and the
changes that occurred over time.
9. See, for example, the entry on the miniature by Pia Palladino (in
Carboni et al. 2007, p. 299, no. 15).
10. The whitish objects the vendor standing between the columns distributes from his large wicker basket are more likely to be rolls than
eggs, as they are often described, since he is dropping them into a
shopper’s apron.
11. The Ponte della Paglia was constructed in 1360. Compared with
the toylike structures of the cityscape, the bridge, built of limestone blocks set in thick beds of mortar, evinces an almost “magic
realism.” As a technical feat it may have commanded the attention
of visitors and thus found entry into contemporary guidebooks.
Olschki (1937, p. 225) maintains that the bridge in the miniature
represents the Ponte di Rialto. As can be seen in Carpaccio’s Miracle
of the Relic of the Holy Cross of 1495 (Galleria dell’Accademia,
Venice; see Sgarbi 1994, p. 11) and the detail view from Jacopo de’
Barbari’s engraving of 1500 (Carboni et al. 2007, p. 60, fig. 1),
however, in the early 1400s the Ponte di Rialto was a wooden
drawbridge that parted at the center to allow the passage of the
doge’s sumptuous boat, the bucintoro. Fra Giocondo’s project for
a stone bridge of 1514—one of many submitted at the time—was
realized by Antonio da Ponte only between 1588 and 1592.
Another feature of striking realism in the miniature are the fondamenti or rivi. They consist of wooden planks nailed to sturdy
posts rammed into the muddy bottom of the canal. This system of
securing the embankments was still in use in Carpaccio’s time; he
depicted it in 1495 in the scene of the departure of Saint Ursula
and her fiancé in the cycle The Legend of Saint Ursula (Galleria
dell’Accademia; see Sgarbi 1994, pp. 80ff.), which takes place in
an imaginary northern country but draws on Carpaccio’s visual
experience of the Venetian cityscape. The Canal Grande and other
larger thoroughfares had stone embankments early on (see Gentile
Bellini’s Miracle of the Holy Cross at Ponte di San Lorenzo of about
1500 in the Galleria dell’Accademia), but the wooden fondamenti
of the minor canals and rivi were replaced by stone structures
much later (see, for example, the engravings by Giacomo Franco
of 1610 [Del Negro and Preto 1998, p. 714, fig. 5, p. 718, fig. 8]).
During this ongoing process, which included the constant dredging of the canals, innumerable terracotta pellets were excavated
that were used in practicing the sport of archi da balle (bows) over
several centuries (see Busiri Vici 1963, specifically p. 349n12).
Young men are using bows to shoot such pellets at cormorants in
Carpaccio’s Hunting on the Lagoon (Figures 7, 8).
12. In the illuminated manuscript of Le livre des merveilles in the
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (ms. fr. 2810, fol. 14; see
Zorzi 1988, p. 30, fig. 15), which dates to about the same time as
A Venetian Vignette 55
Bodley 264, Marco is shown taking leave with his father and uncle
(on horseback) in a similar cinnabar-colored outfit.
13. Pia Palladino in Carboni et al. 2007, p. 299, no. 15.
14. Cogs were the typical vessels for bulk cargo (see Howard 2007, p.
77). A huge cog under construction in a floating dock is shown in
front of the arsenal (inscribed armamentarium) in the enormous
woodcut of Venice by Erhard Reuwich of 1486 that was printed in
Mainz. The Dutch artist accompanied Bernhard von Breydenbach,
canon of Mainz Cathedral, on his trip to the Holy Land in 1483.
His illustrations are precious factual documents.
15. For a nearly contemporary parallel, see the detail in the fourth of
the magnificent set of Flemish tapestries, the so-called Devonshire
Hunting Tapestries, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London
(Woolley 2002, pl. 14), where otters, swans, and herons are the
game of either hunters, trained hawks, or daredevil children (who
try in vain to rob a swans’ nest). Next to this scene is a walled seaport, connected by a drawbridge to the bank of an estuary, where
cogs are anchored behind the crenellated town and a galley is being
rowed into the harbor, its aft cabin protected by a precious tent.
16. Even Olschki (1937, p. 132, fig. 8, and pp. 225ff.) disregards it in his
interpretation of the miniature.
17. Only in an enlargement of the miniature can one make out what
might be the outline of a dark bird with a white neck. Considering
the overall dimensions of the miniature, it was an impossible feat
to depict the bird more clearly. Presumably Johannes could reckon
on the foreknowledge of the viewer. On cormorants, see Brehm
1911, pp. 136–40. Cormorants belong to the order Steganopodes
(see Knauer 2003). The term cormorant is transmogrified from
corvus marinus (sea raven), first attested in the Latin-German
Reichenau glosses of the eighth century.
18. Elke Böhr graciously provided fresh information, citing Schöne and
Schmidt 2009. Cormorants are shown in flight and in the characteristic half-submerged position next to the swans’ nest in the
Devonshire Hunting Tapestries (see note 15 above). Unlike ducks
and herons, cormorants had nothing to fear from falconers, since
they were considered unfit for human consumption.
19. See Knauer 2003, p. 36nn1–2. The paintings, reunited for a short
period at an exhibition in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 1999–
2000, had already been recognized in the 1960s as being part of
a double door or shutter, as the Getty view of the lagoon has on
its back a trompe l’oeil—letters pinned to a framed board (ibid.,
pp. 32–33, figs. 1–3).
20. Ibid., p. 35. Despite the careful study of the symbolic connotations
of the objects surrounding the two women by Gentili and Polignano
(Gentili and Polignano 1993; Polignano 1993), I doubt the women’s
respectability, based on their hairstyles, jewelry, and deportment
and the color and cut of their dresses (see Knauer 2002).
21. A butcher’s stall is attached to the Torre dell’Orologio in the depiction of the Piazzetta and Piazza San Marco in a painting by
Bonifazio de’ Pitati (1487–1553) at the Accademia in Venice (cat.
no. 917) of about 1543–44; the explanatory label calls the shop a
furrier’s, but the suspended pinkish objects with dangling legs
speak against that.
22. The Black Sea coast emporia also served as slave markets; the
Genoese at Caffa (Feodosiya) and the Venetians were notorious for
their systematic shipping of young slaves of both sexes and of the
most varied races, mainly hailing from the Kipchak steppe, to supply the harems of Islamic courts and to fill the ranks of their armies.
The primary recipients were the sultans of Mamluk Egypt, but Italy
and other Christian countries too were interested in the acquisition
of “infidels,” the women to be employed as house slaves, the men
in agriculture and crafts. Already in antiquity the steppes of the
56
northern Black Sea region were an acknowledged source of human
merchandise; Strabo (Geography 11.2.3) reported that the nomadic
tribes of those territories exchanged slaves for clothing, wine, and
other Mediterranean commodities. Marco Polo brought back with
him to Venice a Tartar slave named Peter. The slave trade was by
no means interrupted after the Western merchants had lost their
footholds around the Black Sea. Once they were willing to embrace
Christianity, the captives could improve their station. See the magisterial work of Charles Verlinden (1955–77, especially vol . 2); see
also Origo 1955; Elze 1981, pp. 131–35; Heers 1981; and GüneshYagci 2007. Before the capture of Byzantium by the crusaders in
1204, Italian traders were a rare sight around the Black Sea because
no official support from their hometowns was forthcoming; their
activities took wing only after that event (see Jacoby 2007 and
Ortalli, Ravegnani, and Schreiner 2006).
23. See Larner 1999, chap. 7, pp. 116–32, and Rossabi 2002; see also
Abulafia 2000 and Jackson 1999. For the Latin reports of the
monks who had contacted the Mongols in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, see Van den Wyngaert 1929. The first wave of a
devastating disease, the so-called Black Death, was carried from
the Kipchak steppe to the Crimea and on merchant vessels to
Europe in 1347, rats being the carriers of the bacterium. The loss
of lives all over Europe and Asia was staggering and significantly
contributed to the collapse of the trade links. The contacts established before these catastrophes, however, prepared the West for
the great discoveries of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The East was no longer a terra incognita.
24. Larner (1999, pp. 88–104), despite Rustichello’s “chivalric rhetoric,” sees Marco’s book in the tradition of cosmographical works
and affirms that he must have used notes he had taken during his
twenty-four years in China when he dictated his Divisament dou
monde (Description of the World) to Rustichello. He may have
been aware of the remarkable state of mapmaking in China.
25. English translation from Yule (1866) 1967, vol. 2, pp. 189–91. For
the Latin text, see Van den Wyngaert 1929, vol. 1, pp. 462–63.
For the significance of Odoric, see Reichert 1987 and 1992,
pp. 123–26, though he does not discuss the cormorant passage.
Carpaccio shows no ties around the necks of the birds in his
painting, but cormorants can be trained to disgorge their catch
without the cords. See, for example, Salvin (1859) 1972.
26. Yule (1866) 1967, vol. 2, pp. 192–94, and Reichert 1992, pp. 149–
51. See also Arnold 1999, especially chap. 10, “Assessing the
Franciscan Presence in China: The Archaeological Evidence,”
pp. 135–51. On his voyage through China, Odoric frequently
stayed in the houses of the Friars Minor (Richard 1998). The
Nestorians who long preceded the Latin orders and became their
adversaries once they arrived had been quite effective in their missionary work in China from as early as the seventh century. This is
attested by the famous Nestorian stele of A.D. 781 discovered in
Xi’an in 1625, which bears a Chinese and a Syriac inscription. For
the interpretation of this monument, see Saeki 1951. See also Klein
2000 and Winkler and Tang 2009.
27. For the evidence of the practice in the Far East, see the unrivaled
study by Berthold Laufer (1931), and see also Knauer 2003, p. 35
and n. 24, and Larner 1999, pp. 128–30. On Western merchants
in China, see Yule (1866) 1967, pp. cxxxiii–cxxxiv.
28. The background of The Deposition, one in a series of ten tapestries
depicting the Passion of Christ in the Treasury of San Marco,
Venice, based on cartoons by Niccolò di Pietro (ca. 1420), displays
the same formation of single trees growing from bare rocks; see
Dellwing 1974, pl. 65. For a rich documentation of the phenomenon, see Bettini et al. 1974.
29. See Olschki 1937, p. 226. For the presence of lions or big cats on
early maps, one of the earliest being the mosaic map in the sixthcentury Church of Madaba in Jordan, see Knauer 1981, pp. 84n16,
85–86nn28–29, and Arentzen 1984, pp. 92 (hic leones et fenix
[in Arabia]), 53n95 (hic abundant leones).
30. See Hartt 1940, who refers to the dead tree at the left and the leafy
tree at the right of the painting. This is a contrast often encountered
in Carpaccio’s religious paintings; see, for example, The Flight into
Egypt and The Virgin Reading in the National Gallery of Art,
Washington (Walker 1984, nos. 240, 242). The significance of this
feature remains to be explored. The key passages of his interpretation are repeated almost verbatim in Hartt and Wilkins 2003, pp.
459–61. No mention is made of the Muslim ambience. Hartt suggests the late 1490s as a plausible date for the painting.
31. As attested by early Christian and high medieval cartography. See
note 29 above.
32. See Allsen 2006a and Allsen 2006b, pp. 254–60. In antiquity, the
hunting leopard, specifically the cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus), was
found from Morocco to northwestern India and in East Africa. By
the seventh century A.D., hunting with the animals became
immensely popular in the Islamic realm and was adopted in China;
see also Brehm 1915, pp. 150–56. Since the animals do not reproduce in captivity, they were traded over huge distances together
with their trainers. As highly desirable princely gifts, they reached
European courts in the thirteenth century; Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, in Sicily a neighbor of the Muslim grandees of North
Africa, was among the first recipients. Princes in northern Italy
followed suit in the Renaissance. Venice must have seen many
leopards arrive as imports from the Islamic and Mongol world. It
appears that the leopard was soon perceived as an emblem of
Muslim rule by Italian artists. An early example is Marin Sanudo’s
Liber secretorum fidelium crucis (ca. 1307), in illustrated copies of
which a lion is assigned to the Tatars (Mongols) and a leopard to
the Mamluks (see Degenhart and Schmitt 1980, no. 636). On
Sanudo’s importance as a mapmaker and author, see Edson 2007,
pp. 60–74. A prime example of studies from nature is Pisanello’s
colored drawing of a cheetah with a dog collar in the Louvre, Paris
(2426), now ascribed to Michelino da Besozzo by Schmitt
(Degenhart and Schmitt 1995, fig. 25; reference supplied by
Dorothea Stichel). Giovannino de’ Grassi provides several other
examples, among them the drawings in a sketchbook in the
Biblioteca Civica in Bergamo (Degenhart and Schmitt 1980,
p. 174, fig. 297, and p. 540, fig. 502). Another is folio 41 in Jacopo
Bellini’s sketchbook in the Louvre (Degenhart and Schmitt 1990,
vol. 7, pl. 50). It seems significant that whenever Jacopo Bellini
depicted tethered cheetahs in narrative scenes the subject matter
was highly sinister. Several cheetahs are tethered to the wall in the
lower level of the building in his drawing Enthroned Ruler Presented
with Severed Head in the Louvre (45; Eisler 1989, pl. 88). Since
some of the figures wear classical dress, I would suggest that the
setting is the palace of the Parthian king Orodes II, who receives
the severed head of the Roman general Crassus after his defeat at
Carrhae (53 B.C.). Another of Bellini’s drawings (British Museum,
London, 90; Eisler 1989, pl. 201) shows the Flagellation of Christ in
a loggia, at the foot of which appears a leashed cheetah. Giovanni
Mansueti’s Arrest of Saint Mark of 1499 (Fürstlich Liechtensteinsche
Gemäldegalerie, Vaduz) shows an Oriental “pet,” a big cat with a
dog collar, in an imaginary structure suggestive of the Mamluk
court in Alexandria, and see also his Incidents from the Life of San
Marco in the Accademia in Venice (cat. no. 562). Hans Burgkmair
the Elder, who traveled extensively in northern Italy and Venice,
was certainly familiar with the underlying message: in his Esther
before Ahasverus of 1528 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich, 689), a cheetah is shown next to the throne of the tyrant. The importance of
beasts of prey in Islamic hunting is documented on the so-called
Baptistère de Saint Louis in the Louvre, a metal basin of the 1260s
with inlaid scenes, among them a cheetah on a leash (see Knauer
1984, pp. 173–78). The motif of the hunting cat also appears frequently on Islamic ceramics of the Mongol period. For Western
observers the connotation must have been not only exotic but a
positively threatening emblem of the Muslim enemy.
33. See Hartt 1940, p. 30. Job, the quintessentially patient sufferer, was
revered in Venice as a saint. Hartt did not notice that the landscape is inhabited exclusively by Muslims.
34. Psalm 42.1: “Quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum;
ita desiderat anima mea ad te, Deus” (As the hart panteth after the
water brooks, so panteth my soul over thee, O God). See
Domagalski 1990, pp. 122–28 (“Der Hirsch am Wasser”), 129–44
(“Der Hirsch am Kantharus”), 144–50 (“Der Hirsch an den Paradiesesflüssen”). See also Bath 1992, pp. 222–24, for instances of
the identification of the stag with the crucified Christ. I cannot
share Hartt’s reading of the landscape on the right side of the picture as peaceful.
35. For a competent essay on the political and religious development
in Venice of the time, see Rössler 1956. On Gasparo Contarini, an
important and representative figure of that reformatory spirit, see
Gleason 1993.
36. The nude human figure among wild beasts and birds in our miniature confirms the character of the scene as a representation of
faraway Paradise.
37. Amitai and Biran 2005, part 3, “The Mongol Empire and Its
Successors,” contains a number of excellent studies covering the
period; in this context, Di Cosmo 2005 is of particular relevance.
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